Daily Press Briefings Are Cancelled – Chapter 7, Act 3, Strip 70

See? Today DM is in a somewhat better shape, and he immediately snaps back to being able to deflect legitimate questions with vague assertions of higher magic sense. I wish he’d be able to do that on Monday. >_>

Of course, his form immediately declines again, as that annoying research question is raised once again. He’s growing so irritated with the embarrassment this continues to cause him, he’s almost to the point of regretting the whole thing from the get-go.

Anyway, the plothole that Gregory brings up is a real one – real both in the sense that it does exist, and that it wasn’t intentional on my part. The bit with Sir Gianfor and the fake dungeon appeared pretty early on during writing, and when I ported it to the final version of the script, I totally overlooked the fact that it now no longer made sense within the larger framework. Why would the Shadow Demon try to stop K’ip here, when his ultimate goal was actually for K’ip to succeed? I didn’t notice that discrepancy until much later, after the strips in question had already been published. I considered ignoring the whole problem (after all, what matters one more hole in a B-movie plot?), but ultimately felt it would be funnier to lampshade it in the most blatant form, by having a protagonist bring it up explicitly, and DM handwave it away.

The part of the smart-aleck protagonist naturally went to Gregory…even if he’s still insecure about his status as the designated intellectual of the party, and halfway expecting the Professor to play that part, which used to come so naturally to him. But the Professor is a Barbarian, right now, and thus very limited in his ability to play an intellectual’s part. The only question he’s allowed to have something of an literate answer to is “What is best in life?”, and even there he’s limited to supplying the same, stock answer every time. With some probing, Gregory steps up.

And, of course, Gregory stepping up here creates another plothole, since there actually isn’t any way that he would have known about Sir Gianfor and the fake dungeon. After all, he’s had no opportunity to speak to K’ip and Si’ri and exchange stories of past exploits. But, hey…in a strip where no less an authority than DM declares that nobody is supposed to sweat such details, I think I can get away with this one. =P

I mean, Gregory can supposedly pull anything out of his magic hat (though granted without categorization the accuracy of what is actually retrieved is questionable), he could have just pulled out the script for the movie and read that while everyone else was gawking at the DM’s dance.
In fact, as long as he’s off-screen, he could be doing just about anything plot convenient with that magic hat.

Yeah, as convenient as that magic hat is as a plot-device, I think the plotholes it rips are larger than the ones it mends – for actually, the team’s most reasonable approach to any problem would probably be to have Gregory pull things from his hat until he happens onto something that fits the situation. XD